“Perhaps the biggest problem of ebooks is that they are unable to properly display mathematical and scientific material.”
That is demonstrably incorrect...
https://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~shapiro/507/book.pdf
The first ten pages provide many examples. BTW, “Classical Mechanics” in particular is a great example of ebook value and portability. :-)
Paper books certainly have their virtues as well, the primary one being “no batteries required”.
One reason is the standards for kindle and epub were not written with technical literature in mind. Publishers who wish to offer mathematical epub books must rely on external css and javascript addon hacks such as MathJax (which is quite good by the way!). The proper way to handle it would be MathML but the designers of Nook and Kindle have not implemented support for it in their software.
A couple years ago I was involved in project to bring more math texts to Kindle and Nook. It is difficult to find a common denominator which works across the board. The area is still difficult and still poorly charted—"here be dragons". I gave it my best shot, but Kindle and Nook internals are still too immature in this area.